A Historical Introduction to the Christ Myth

This article is adapted from the Introduction I wrote for the book Shattering the
Christ Myth (2008), edited by J. P. Holding. The book provides detailed
rebuttals of many of the conspiracy theories that purport to show that Jesus of
Nazareth did not exist. This article compares the Christ Myth to the theory that
Shakespeare did not write his own plays, before examining the various authors
who have tried to sell the idea that Jesus never lived.

A Non-Question: Who Really Wrote the Works of Shakespeare?

eep inside the vaguely fascist edifice of the University of London’s Senate
House is a room that the university authorities view with some embarrassment. It
forms part of the library and is mainly used for seminars and evening studies. I
spent many happy hours there myself learning how to read Anglo Saxon
manuscripts. Before class began, I once took the opportunity to scan the spines
of the books that line the room’s walls. They formed an incoherent collection
relating to late Tudor literature, textual criticism, cryptology and William
Shakespeare. I learnt from the professor who took our class that the books all
belonged to a certain Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence (d. 1914) who donated them to
the library, with a substantial sum of money, on condition that they remained
together in their original cabinets. The library was not too keen on the books
but it wanted the cash so the deal was struck.

You almost certainly haven’t heard of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence and neither
had I until I found myself sitting in his room. So, why is the University of
London embarrassed about him? Well, imagine if the library at Yale had a Graham
Hancock Room full of books devoted to proving the existence of Atlantis. Or that
Princeton accepted the Dan Brown Collection, containing the source material for
the Da Vinci Code. That is how most academics feel about the life’s work
of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence – for he set out to prove that Sir Francis Bacon
wrote the works of Shakespeare.

In fact, you could fill a fair-sized library with all the volumes from the
subgenre devoted to showing that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. It is not
just Sir Francis Bacon who is fingered. Christopher Marlowe is the current
culprit of choice, even though he died before most of Shakespeare’s plays were
written. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was a blameless Tudor aristocrat who
was no more capable of penning King Lear than I am, but several ‘researchers’
have produced books claiming that he did just that. There is even a special name
attached to those who deny the blindingly obvious fact that Shakespeare wrote
his plays. They are called anti-Stratfordians.

Capacious though the output of the anti-Stratfordians may be, it has evinced
little or no reaction from mainstream Shakespearean scholarship. Most critics do
not want to give the harebrained idea any more exposure than it receives
already. However, Professor Sir Brian Vickers, in the guise of a book review of
the latest anti-Stratfordian tome, gave the whole lot of them a good blasting
with both barrels in the Times Literary Supplement in 2005. And Professor
Jonathan Bate (1958 –) devoted a chapter in his excellent book The Genius of
Shakespeare (1997) to trying to understand the reluctance of so many people
to give the Bard his due. It is worth mentioning that Vickers and Bate, eminent
scholars that they both may be, agree on almost nothing apart from the absurdity
of the anti-Stratfordians. Indeed, I would be reluctant to have them both of
them around for tea at the same time in case their disagreement on the virtues
of the First Folio descended into physical violence.

Bate suggests there are three reasons why people are prepared to believe that
Shakespeare didn’t write his plays. The first is the lack of any original
manuscripts. We tend to make a fetish of a certain kind of physical evidence and
when it is not present, become unreasonably sceptical about everything else. As
it happens, several documents signed by Shakespeare do exist but these not
include any of his plays.

The second reason is that most people do not have a sufficient background in
the subject to properly evaluate the evidence. Anti-Stratfordians tend to be
amateurs who have not read enough on Elizabethan theatre to see just how wildly
implausible their ideas are. Let me give you an analogy. I can recognise the
difference between a Yorkshire and Lancashire accent without very much trouble
because I am English. I would never mistake an Irishman for a Scotsman. On the
other hand, when I was living in New Jersey, I was frequently assumed to be
Irish and had no idea that Californians sound different to Texans.
Distinguishing accents isn’t something you tend to be taught. Rather you learn
it by experience and by being immersed in a particular culture. It’s the same
with history. If you have been studying a period for long enough, ideas like the
anti-Stratfordians’ are as obviously incongruous as a baseball bat on a cricket
pitch.

The third reason that Shakespeare is frequently denied the credit for his
plays is that after he died, he was deified. His reputation today is so
stratospheric that it seems implausible that a grammar school boy from a small
town in the Midlands could have achieved what he did. Much is made of the fact
he never went to university or that he had bourgeois origins. Surely the man who
reached such heights of greatness must have been born of the nobility or at
least attended Oxford or Cambridge. The normality of Shakespeare’s life trips us
up. He was a successful business man and professional actor as well as
playwright whose career we can trace quite accurately. Furthermore, he was
recognised as extremely gifted during his lifetime. It made him rich.

Even though this article is about the theory that Jesus never existed, I have
begun with this digression on Shakespeare to illustrate that there is nothing
unique about any conspiracy theory. They are all made up of similar elements and
thrive in the same environments. All three of the reasons Jonathan Bate
suggested in his book for the popularity of conspiracies about Shakespeare are
present in the Christ Myth. For instance, there is no direct contemporary
evidence for Jesus and we do not possess the original manuscripts of any of the
Gospels. Christ Myth theorists are amateurs to whom professional scholars pay
little attention. And finally, Jesus is worshipped as God. But the problem is
the same as with Shakespeare – how could a religion be started by a Galilean
peasant whose message spread around the world. There must, say the conspiracy
theorists, be another explanation.

The similarities do not end there. The nature of the evidence brought forward
by conspiracy theories is much the same whatever the subject. There is a false
belief that we have relatively little contemporary evidence for the life of
Shakespeare or Jesus. In fact, we know far more about both of them than almost
any other personage of their times, barring military heroes and royalty.
Likewise, the theorists tend to present contrived readings of the relevant
texts, claiming they provide clues that simply do not stack up to careful
analysis. Furthermore, the perfectly good testimony we do have for the orthodox
view is rejected by the conspiracy theorist for bogus reasons. For Shakespeare
we are told that all his fellow actors were in on the deception. While with
Jesus, we are told we cannot trust any Christian text. In other words, the
people most interested in both Jesus and Shakespeare, their followers and
colleagues respectively, should be debarred from giving evidence.

Introducing the Christ Myth Conspiracies

Among the earliest efforts to debunk the Bible was a short tract called The
Three Imposters written by an anonymous hack. It appeared in about 1700
purporting to be of medieval origin but was actually a seventeenth century fake.
It created quite a stir among the intelligentsia of London. The three imposters
in question were Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Although the author did not deny
they existed, he claimed they were charlatans rather than men of God. Other
sceptical works appeared through the eighteenth century, including David Hume’s
Natural History of Religion (1757), Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire (1776 – 89) and Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (1794 – 1807).
Although radical and owing little to the common piety of their time, none of
these books suggested that Jesus never lived. Rather, they tended to reduce him
to a man buffeted by the forces of history.

The success of the natural sciences through the eighteenth century encouraged
many thinkers to put other subjects on the same pedestal. It was thought that by
adopting the methods of science, the humanities could emulate its success. The
pioneer of scientific history was Leopold von Ranke (1795 – 1886), a German
aristocrat who spent most of his academic career working for the Prussian crown.
He laid down a very simple historical method. All historical materials were to
be divided into two categories – primary sources and secondary sources. The
former were to consist exclusively of eye-witness reports and contemporary
documents. These, said von Ranke, were reliable and the historian should base
his work upon them. Everything else was dumped into the secondary-sources box.
According to von Ranke, this stuff was useless for history. The problems with
this rigid approach are obvious, but the ‘scientific’ flavour of the method
found favour in the nineteenth century. It was not long before it was used on
the documents in the New Testament. The most famous book ever on the historical
Jesus is called simply The Life of Jesus (1835). It was written by a German
Lutheran professor called David Strauss (1808 – 74) and translated into English
by the famous novelist George Eliot (1819 – 1880). Von Ranke’s methodology
informed Strauss’s book on every level and he extremely concerned to pick out
the eyewitness kernel from the New Testament. Even this book did not assert that
Jesus was a myth, but it did lay a substantial amount of the groundwork by
making now-traditional assertions about the unreliability of the Gospels.

Von Ranke’s method was called source criticism and when applied to biblical
studies became known as higher criticism. Before long, radical scholars based at
the University of Tübingen and in Holland started to use higher criticism as a
method of forwarding their political agenda against the Lutheran and Calvinist
Churches. As the stakes was raised, later and later dates were proposed for the
Gospels and Paul’s letters began to be ejected from the canon. Soon the higher
critics had agreed that there was nothing in the New Testament that met von
Ranke’s test of primary evidence. Jesus was lost behind an alleged veil of later
Christian interpolation. Still, even as the twentieth century dawned, it was
hard to find anyone who would seriously assert that he never lived.

Hard but not impossible – especially if you extended your search beyond the
confines of trained scholars. There were, as ever, amateurs ready to rush in
where the experts feared to tread.

The Origins of the Christ Myth

The earliest writer to definitely assert that Jesus never existed was a
German called Bruno Bauer (1809 – 82). He was a theologian who lost his licence
to preach due to his radical leftwing politics. His voluminous books were never
translated into English but did catch the eye of Friedrich Engels (1820 – 95),
the collaborator of Karl Marx (1818 – 83). In Kritik der evangelischen
Geschichte und der Synoptiker (1841/42) and later works, Bauer suggested that
the story of Jesus had been invented from the whole cloth by the evangelist, St
Mark, who had then convinced everyone else of his Gospel’s authenticity. Any
earlier references to Jesus were, according to Bauer, interpolations added to
documents at a later date. Given the shortcomings of his thesis, it is no
surprise that Bauer had little impact on mainstream scholarship. Even later
supporters of the Christ Myth, like John M. Robertson, failed to find him
convincing.

In the late-nineteenth century, the term by which atheists preferred to
describe themselves was ‘rationalist.’ There were several small societies
devoted to the cause and also a publishing house, the Rationalist Press
Association, which arranged for several books by German anti-religious writers
to be translated into English. Among them was Arthur Drews (1865 - 1935), a
professor of philosophy at the University of Karlsruhe, whose book The Christ
Myth (1911) probably gives us the earliest full length treatment of the thesis
in English. Drews wrote that “he had hoped until lately that one of the
historians of Christianity would himself arise” to champion the theory that
Jesus never existed. He was disappointed and became the first in a long line of
amateurs to offer his own ideas which real historians had no interest in
promoting.

Drews, together with the other early-twentieth century Christ Mythologists,
based his work on the concurrent history of religions school best represented by
The Golden Bough (1890) of Sir James Frazer (1854 – 1941). Frazer and his
colleagues tried to find overarching themes that provided a universal framework
for human mythology. It seemed logical at the time that this framework could
also be used to explain the development of Christianity. Drews also devoted
plenty of effort to attacking the traditional sources for the historical Jesus.
The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus (1912), incidentally translated into
English by the rogue friar Joseph McCabe, contains almost all the same arguments
about the references to Jesus in Tacitus, Josephus and the rest that are now
scattered over the internet. It is remarkable how little Christ Myth arguments
have developed over the last one hundred years. If anything, Drews is even more
extreme, following the Dutch Radicals such as W. C. van Manen (1842 – 1905) in
claiming that all Paul’s letters are forgeries.

Arthur Drews was the main influence of Britain’s most important early Christ
Mythologist, John M. Robertson (1856 – 1933). He was a self-taught journalist and
radical politician who held a seat in Parliament for the Liberal Party from 1906
to 1918. While the rest of the country was fighting the First World War,
Robertson published a two-volume exposition of his views on Jesus. The first,
The Historical Jesus (1916), is an attack on contemporary liberal scholarship
for not being radical enough. The second, The Jesus Problem (1917), sets out his
own thesis that the Jesus of Christianity is actually a development of some sort
of pre-Christian myth. One has to wonder what Robertson’s constituents made of
all this literary activity when there was a war on.

Over in the United States, the Christ Myth flag was being flown by the
mathematician, William B. Smith (1850 - 1934). Smith added an additional weapon to the
mythologists' armoury, that of reading new meanings into texts that appear to say
something quite different. He deployed this method in his last book The Birth of
the Gospel (1957), not published until some years after his death, which claimed
that Christianity was a product of the Jewish Diaspora and had no real
connection to ancient Judea or Palestine. Another American Mythologist was John Remsburg (1848 – 1919) whose book
The Christ (1909) claimed that Jesus Christ
was a pagan god and that Jesus of Nazareth was completely lost to history.

The generation of Christ Mythologists represented by Smith and Robertson died
out in the 1920s. They had based their work on theories from the
history of religions school but scholarship itself moved on, leaving the Christ
Mythologists high and dry. They looked like scientists who had based their
theories on the ether while the rest of the world got on with discovering
quantum mechanics. A few amateurs trudged on. In France, there has always been
an anti-clerical party to provide a market for the Christ Myth. P. L. Couchoud’s
The Enigma of Jesus (1924) was even translated into English with a forward by
none other than Sir James Frazer (himself now something of a historical relic). Couchoud was a medical doctor whose qualification to write about Jesus was that,
according to Frazer, he had “written an interesting volume of Oriental wisdom
and poetry.” A later French effort, La Fable de Jesus Christ (1967) by G Fan, is
notable only for using another standard part of the mythologist’s modus operandi –
that of arbitrarily assigning late dates to the sources to impeach their
reliability.

Among English speakers, the torch was kept flickering by minor figures like
Archibald Robertson (Jesus: Myth or History? (1949)) and H. Cutner (Jesus: God,
Man or Myth? (1950)). The Christ Myth hit rock bottom in 1968 with the
publication of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by John Allegro (1923 – 88).
Unlike all the other writers we have met, Allegro was no amateur which makes his
book all the stranger. He was one of the scholars who had been instrumental in
wresting the Dead Sea Scrolls from the hands of the bureaucrats who had been
preventing free access to them. However, his long battle with officialdom took
its toll and he became convinced that a conspiracy existed to keep the Dead Sea
Scrolls out of the public eye. The other contributing factor to The Sacred
Mushroom and the Cross was the hippy counter-culture of the 1960s with its
emphasis on psychedelic drugs and sexual imagery. The book caused a bigger
splash in the public imagination than many Christ Myth theories, but it destroyed
Allegro’s academic reputation overnight.

It was not until 1971 that the Christ Myth burst back into life with the work
of a polite and erudite Professor of German from Birkbeck College, University of
London, called George Albert Wells (1926 - ). In one sense, Wells is a return to
the tradition of Drews and Robertson. He is a well read amateur with a fine
prose style. Of all the Christ Mythologists, no other is quite so much of a
pleasure to read. His atheist credentials are impeccable – he was chairman of
the Rationalist Press Association and still gives talks to university humanist
societies even now he is in his 80s. But as a proponent of the Christ Myth, he
suffers from being almost too honest and has frequently changed his mind on key
questions.

For his first book The Jesus of the Early Christians (1971), Wells took
advantage of his fluency in German to read the radical work of Drews, Bauer and
others. He had access to all the books that had never been translated into
English. The result was a restatement of the early-twentieth century argument
that used pagan parallels and interpolation as its main planks. The book was
released by a trade publisher and received critical reviews in some academic
journals. None of his later works received the same sort of attention.

Wells’s next book Did Jesus Exist? (1975), accepted some of the criticisms of
his earlier work and was based on adopting the most radical possibilities among
mainstream scholars. As it is often possible to find someone in the academy who
will take an extreme view on one particular topic, Wells could construct his
thesis from a mosaic of scepticism to produce the overall conclusion that Jesus
never existed. That none of the scholars he based his case on would have agreed
meant Wells was no longer being taken seriously by the scholarly mainstream. The
Historical Evidence for Jesus (1982) dumped the interpolations and pagan
parallels in favour of Jesus as a Jewish myth. In it, Wells also launched a
fierce attack on previous proponents of the Christ Myth, blaming them for its
lack of acceptance. “The books by Fau, [William B.] Smith and Allegro,” Wells
wrote, “do much to explain why serious students of the New Testament today
regard the existence of Jesus as an unassailable fact.” Wells’s criticism of
Smith could apply to almost any Christ Mythologist when he says “It is difficult
to produce decisive evidence against scholars who insist on finding hidden
meanings in plain statements.”

For Wells himself, it was too late. He was already tarred with the same
brush. The Historical Evidence for Jesus was published by Prometheus rather than
a conventional publishing house and ignored by the review editors of academic
journals. Nevertheless, he kept going. The Jesus Legend (1986) postulated that
Jesus lived in 100BC but Wells dumped that theory for his next book. By the
1990s, he had dropped the Christ Myth altogether. When I met him briefly in 2003,
he accepted that Paul knew that Jesus had been crucified by the Romans in
Jerusalem. He also believed that the teaching of Jesus that we find in the
Gospels had come from a real Galilean preacher. He just didn’t accept that they
were one and the same person. I suppose that Wells has gone from believing that
there was no historical Jesus to concluding that there were two of them. This is
an improvement of sorts.

The Contemporary Scene

If G. A. Wells has fallen from the faith, the doyen of today’s Christ Mythologists is Earl Doherty from Canada. Through his book,
The Jesus Puzzle
(1999), and his website, he has attracted a considerable following among the
internet’s atheist community. His work is critiqued in detail later on in this
book and so I will content myself with noting that much of what he has to say
has been prefigured in the early-twentieth-century works we have discussed in
this introduction. Doherty has even accused G. A. Wells of not being radical
enough, a position that Wells himself finds novel.

Earl Doherty is not the only Christ Mythologist active today. Timothy Freke
and Peter Gandy produced a surprise bestseller with their breathlessly
sensationalist The Jesus Mysteries (1999). Their thesis, if we can dignify it
with such a name, is based on the same pagan parallels that even most Christ
Mythologists have decided to reject. Freke and Gandy never let their ideas
become burdened by the facts, launching themselves on flights of speculation
that no serious scholar would even countenance.
Even amulet that they use as the
picture on their front cover had been denounced as a fake over fifty years ago.
The authors were aware of this inconvenient fact but chose not to mention it in
their book. They have followed up The Jesus Mysteries with books firmly based on
New Age mysticism which take them beyond the bounds of fringe scholarship.

I cannot pretend that this brief survey of Christ Mythology is exhaustive.
Recently, for example, Joseph Atwill has published his Caesar's Messiah
(2005) which contains a theory that is far-fetched even by the standards of the
Christ Myth. It has also become the foundation of a trashy novel in the same
genre as Dan Brown called The First Apostle (2009) by James Becker. Nor
can this article even touch on the array of atheist websites on the internet that have
sprung up to promote the ideas of Doherty and Wells. However, there are three
general themes which I think run through Christ Mythology throughout its history
for the last century and a half. The first is that all its proponents, with very
few exceptions, as not specialists in the New Testament but amateurs
dissatisfied with the scholarly consensus. Christ Mythologists continue to blame
real scholars of theological bias for not taking their ideas seriously and
scholars continue to ignore them. The second theme is that the arguments against
Jesus existing have not changed much. Indeed, the internet has probably revived
the few that had thankfully passed away. Finally, the Christ Myth is and always
has been a conspiracy theory. It is those who oppose it rather than those who
support it who should rightfully be called sceptics.